The Hatter addresses the jury: "14th of March, I think it was" he said.
"15th" said the March Hare
"16th" said the Dormouse
"Write that down" the King said to the jury;
and the jury eagerly wrote down all the 3 dates on their slates
and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.
*****
(Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, via Maria Popova)
*****
There are so many kinds of Time. Consider this description of NOW in Astrological Time:
If you're looking at the stars — and why wouldn't you be? you'll know that Saturn has entered the sign of Pisces. It happened in early March: shaggy old Saturn, god of constriction and mortality, has lowered his haunches into the Piscean waters. He'll be there until May 2025, an intractable lump in that wishy-washy environment. Displacing it. Blocking it. Imposing his limits.
Enough with the changeability, he says to dippy, fin-flashing Pisces. Enough with the half-assedness. Further mutation is not possible. Now you're going to face — and be stuck with — yourself.
(James Parker, April 2023 The Atlantic, pg 68)
*****
I've been exploring my own involvement in various understandings of Time, and I realize that I've been thinking around Time a lot in these last weeks, or is it months? Or longer. What follows is sort of a guided tour through the Times I've found myself visiting as I wrestled with Brian's Question: What do you think about time?
I remember a characterization quoted to me by Bill Skinner 50+ years ago:
Time goes on and on (e.g., life passes, history unrolls...)
Time goes round and round (e.g., hours of the day repeat; dynasties rise and decline)
Time goes back and forth (e.g., the tides come in and go out; the pendulum swings)
and there are cycles to be attended to: the seasons; longer-cycle regularities (e.g., The 28-year Solar cycle of the Julian calendar, after which days of the months return again to the same days of the week); the inception, heyday, and decline of imperial dynasties... and so on. And on. And further on.
I have lots of books that are somehow involved with Time and its passage; indeed, few are entirely outside of time, or can be seen as time-irrelevant. A lot of my attention over the years has gone into Histories of many sorts, and into tracking change and trying to unravel and understand dynamics (the calculus of changes in Time) at scale levels from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
...on April 17 at 12:42 UTC (or April 17 at 8:42 a.m. EDT), New Horizons will reach a rare deep-space milepost — 50 astronomical units from the Sun, or 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth is...
It's almost 5 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) away; a remote region where one of those radioed commands, even traveling at the speed of light, needs seven hours to reach the far flung spacecraft. Then add seven more hours before its control team on Earth finds out if the message was received.
...and of course the Webb telescope offers us even more macro views almost daily...
Building an eloquent array of collected thoughts about Time is a pretty challenging prospect, but I do want to narrate my exploration of kinds of Time that I've been thinking and reading about. Bulleted sections may help to keep some sort of order, though each is the proverbial tip of iceberg/ears of hippopotamus.
Each of these varieties of Time has its own metric, its own dramas. And many can be found in books I've been visiting and revisiting. Each of the bulleted varieties below has associated chronologies, but their apparently linear course obscures complexities and intercalations: Time is messy, uneven, rife with confusions and contradictions. And all of its versions are imaginary: We thought them up, and we live within them. That's as scary as it is profound.
Personal Time
Autobiographical Time is nearest and dearest, the personal Narrative over which I preside and gleefully tend. Mine is verging on 80 years of curation and augmentation. Everybody has such a compendium of stories and memories, upon which they draw for identity.
Genealogical Time is reckoned in generations and populated with vertical and horizontal linkages, and affinal connections. Thus, I'm the last representative of my branch of the 12th generation since the ur-Blackmore of Scituate MA. My Forebears Blurb book and the genealogical work Betsy and I did 20-odd years ago live in this Time.
Cohort Time, for us that envelope of contemporaries who came aboard in maybe 1942 and mostly 1943 and some in 1944, and who are now departing one by one... among whom there is some sharing of temporal understanding (where were you when Kennedy was shot?) and cultural identity...
At the Grand Scale:
Lithospheric Time and Geologic Time have depths in billions of years, and allow us to meditate upon the collisions of tectonic plates, the rise of the Himalayas, Appalachians, Rockies, Sierra Nevada, Andes, etc., and the weathering processes that make sedimentary deposits which are then recycled. I have lots of relevant geology books, and John McPhee's Annals of the Former World is in my current reading.
Atmospheric Time, from the 2 billion+ years in which early prokaryotic bacteria began to liberate oxygen and to build the essentially stable atmosphere in which all terrestrial living beings now live. The several Lynn Margulis books are prime material.
Biospheric Time and Paleontological Time, more than a billion years of evolution and adaptation and succession of life forms...
Terrestrial Time, embodied in a spinning globe entrained in an orbit around the Sun, more or less 24 hours light to dark to light, more or less 365+ days to complete that orbit
Calendar Time and Solar System Time
The Earth shivers ever so slightly. With the oceanic tides acting as brakes, the planet slows in its rotation by fractions of a second each year... (James Gleick, Faster pg 4)
The fastest is the startle reflex. If you're walking along and you suddenly hear a loud noise, your ear will trigger an extremely simple chain of just three neurons that connect to the spinal cord and brain stem. Within five milliseconds, hundreds of muscles are recruited into a self-defense reaction: eyelids shut, shoulders and chest tighten up, hands clench. There's absolutely nothing you can do about it — by the time you're consciously aware that you've been startled, you're already two feet in the air.
Given a few more milliseconds, the body is able to respond in a more nuanced way. When something threatening occurs, it takes about 12 milliseconds for the information to reach the amygdala, the almond-shaped neural hub that's one of the most important centers for emotional processing. The amygdala isn't super-sophisticated, but it knows what danger looks like... (What is the speed of thought?)
...a team of neuroscientists from MIT has found that the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds — the first evidence of such rapid processing speed. (In the blink of an eye)
... A response time of 100ms is perceived as instantaneous; Response times of 1 second or less are fast enough for users to feel they are interacting freely with the information; Response times greater than 10 seconds completely lose the user's attention... (How Fast is Real-Time?)
One femtosecond — a quadrillionth, or million billionth, of a second — is a thousand times shorter than the picosecond snippets of time in which molecules react.
A gigaflop is a billion floating-point operations per second, a teraflop is one trillion, and a petaflop is a quadrillion. FLOPS particularly matter when you are talking about high-performance computing.
*** *
Vocational and Avocational Time
Class Time
30+ years ago (1973-1990) I pretty much lived my days preparing what to say to fill allotted hours each week, then saying it. Then preparing for the next engagement, week after week. The classroom hours were only about 9 hours each week, which doesn't sound like much What did I do with the rest of those hours at work? Mostly preparing: reading, writing, assembling, etc. I put a lot of time into making the handouts that I used instead of textbooks, and into preparing what I'd show — images projected mostly, and audio examples for Cross-Cultural Studies in Music.
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
Books have their own genealogies and affinities, and chronologies of publication and use, and readers encounter books seriatim. Consider the vellichor of libraries and used bookstores:
the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you'll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured. (from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
Biblio Time facilitates Time Travel, and allows the reader to discover how the world seemed to authors 10, 50, 500 years ago; what they had to work with in understanding and representing the world around them.
thus we can wonder how 'Artifical Intelligence' was conceptualized, imagined, described (etc.) before November 2022... and how much and how widely and with what possible/probable effects has vernacular understanding evolved in the months since then... OR one might experience upper middle class London in the 1920s via Mrs Dalloway ... or Dublin on Bloomsday... or the instantiation of cyberspace (in which we and billions of others assuredly abide) by William Gibson, ca. 1983...
Lexical Time follows language in spacetime: new words, changes in meaning and sense, memery, etymology... I have a forest of dictionaries to support this enthusiasm, which is a central locale of innovation in our society and culture...
Technological Time
...is another universe in which I've invested a lot of energies, as a student of tehnological evolution. In 1992 (while a student at Simmons) I designed a Reference Collection for the offices of the Society for the History of Technology, and there's a large tranche of my own Library that collects my own resources in this area. Technological Time is often punctuated by invention and innovation, and is also accompanied by unanticipated consequences (for the best example, see a recent New York Times piece on Thomas Midgley). History of technology is suffused with quite remarkable accelerations in capability (think Moore's Law, which tracks the miniaturization of logic circuitry that continues to drive what computers can do, and so props up the "AI Revolution" of the moment... with consequences including the reorganization of many activities, professions, occupations, and productive processes).
Musical Time
So much to say about this... Musical Time might be laid out as a multidimensional and geographical history of innovation and style and genres and influences, a marvelous ever-expanding territory of sonic creativity in which to wander. All you need is ears. We find features like *Pregnant Moments (e.g., the 1927 Bristol Sessions which ignited "country music") and *Breakthrough Events (for some, but not for me, Miles Davis Bitches Brew is one such), and *Riveting Examples (the first exposure to Grace Slick's "White Rabbit", Tony Rice's guitar break in E.M.D (1976) ... etc. etc.) — and of course a coruscating history of arrival and departure of performers who fit into and push the conventional limits of the music of their time... I have a vast stratigraphy of seriatim acquisition of books and LPs and CDs and MP3s and videos, and many hours dedicated to study and ambient exposure and Collection Development...
...a song blooms from a moment, a situation, a circumstance, and quickly becomes historical [i.e., it has its own chronotope or wherewhen]. While some achieve immortality and applicability to many situations ('We Shall Overcome' certainly did that), others contain references and allusions that require background to make them comprehensible.
Old devil time, I'm goin' to fool you now!
Old devil time, you'd like to bring me down!
When I'm feeling low, my lovers gather 'round
And help me rise to fight you one more time!
Old devil fear, you with your icy hands,
Old devil fear, you'd like to freeze me cold!
When I'm sore afraid, my lovers gather 'round
And help me rise to fight you one more time!
Old devil pain, you often pinned me down,
You thought I'd cry, and beg you for the end
But at that very time, my lovers gather 'round
And help me rise to fight you one more time!
Old devil hate, I knew you long ago,
Then I found out the poison in your breath.
Now when we hear your lies, my lovers gather 'round
And help me rise to fight you one more time!
No storm nor fire can ever beat us down,
No wind that blows but carries us further on.
And you who fear, oh lovers, gather 'round
And we can rise and sing it one more time!
Three Moments in Musical Time: Brian sent me a link to Chris Stapleton's rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner from the last Superbowl:
...which immediately made me think of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, 1969:
...and for variety, add Whitney Houston, 1991:
Artistic Time and Photographic Time
So much to say about this...
My engagement with Photographic Time has been rich and satisfying and multimodal. Perhaps the essence is the captured moment, the 1/50 or 1/5000 of a second of "exposure" in which the image of what is subsequently taken for a slice of reality is committed to a physiochemical or electronic medium.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Harold Edgerton
The history of photography is endlessly fascinating: personalities, styles, innovation, equipment,
chronotopes, e.g., that of Robert Frank's The Americans, or one could explore endlessly The Family of Man...
Cemetery Time
(there will be more...)
I searched Maria Popova's Marginalian for mentions of time and plucked some especially toothsome passages:
And time is a dictator, as we know it. Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive? Is it a thing that we cannot touch and is it alive? (Nina Simone)
There's an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs. (Rebecca Solnit)
The sense of time is "embodied" in a more all-encompassing way than the other senses. Ultimately, time perception is not mediated by a specific sense organ, as happens in the case of the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch. There is no sense organ for time. Subjective time as a sense of self is a physically and emotionally felt wholeness of our entire self through time.
...even humanity's greatest thinkers, be the scientists or philosophers or poets, have failed to offer an adequate definition of what time actually is, producing instead a variety of aphorisms, wisecracks, and other clever evasions. (Susan Sontag, riffing on John Archibald Wheeler: "Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once." Richard Feynman: "Time is what happens when nothing else happens." Augustine: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.")
The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing. It is subject to the arrow of time. It creates memories as it goes. It models the world and continually compares these models with their predecessors. Whatever consciousness will turn out to be, it's not a moving flashlight illuminating successive slices of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is a dynamical system, occurring in time, evolving in time, able to absorb bits of information from the past and process them, and able as well to create anticipation for the future.
...
What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.
So I went to the nearby shelves and immediately found several books that bear directly upon this Question.
...a book about time and the tricks we play on ourselves to bear our transience...
The young Einstein, overworked and burning with ideas, falls asleep at his patent office desk on a series of nights in that fertile spring of 1905, to dream of worlds in each of which times works differently. Each betokens a particular manifestation of our time-anxiety, that defining anxiety of our lives — each a particular tapestry of our hopes, fears, and other flights from the only reality we have and only place we really inhabit: the present.
...Like The Little Prince, Einstein's Dreams remains one of those endlessly rereadable classics, unfurling new splendors of insight and subtleties of feeling which each reading.
On a nearby shelf was MM Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination [1982], which awakened the memory of the concept of chronotope, essentially the property of wherewhen
...the chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they sprang. (pg 425-426)
...which connects up in my mind with a lot of human geography and ecology and systems theory. Tip o' hat to Ron Nigh, who introduced me to Bakhtin around 2002...
And we'll recall that Time is the central issue in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity:
Time is relative — in other words, the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference. (AMNH)
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
"Everything is determined ... by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper."
David Landes' Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (1983) has been with me since I snaffled it at the Goliard (Amherst MA) in 1986, in the context of studying technological history, but it has cosmological significance as well:
One of the great inventions in the history of mankind — not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to movable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural values, technological change, and personality... (pg 6)
According to Hertog, the new perspective that he has achieved with Hawking reverses the hierarchy between laws and reality in physics and is "profoundly Darwinian" in spirit. "It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of self-organising entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics."
*****
Some YouTube videos that have much to do with Time, and maybe other things too...
